Chakma Letter Ddhaa

It is a curled-tongue d with a short puff of breath. In Chakma, the letter normally carries a long “ah” vowel; a vowel sign can change that vowel, and the maayyaa mark removes it.

One descriptive chart labels the letter “lejabharaat ddhaa.”

Chakma writing has an old manuscript tradition, but its precise origin is uncertain. A 1903 alphabet chart records the script. A Chakma ballad tradition links the religious work Agartara to a 9th-century expedition; this is a traditional account, not a securely dated first appearance of the letter. Chakma manuscripts include religious works kept by Buddhist monks and Vadyali Pudhi, medical records kept by traditional physicians.

Chakma belongs to a wider script family

Chakma belongs to the wider Brahmic family of scripts. A 2009 Unicode proposal describes it as an early Mon-Burmese offshoot within that family. A 2026 Unicode proposal says Tanchangya, another script, based its alphabet on Chakma and changed its shapes to distinguish the two.

Using Chakma script can express a distinct Chakma cultural writing choice. As of 2026, orthography notes report that most Chakma writers use Bengali script, another way to write the language; knowing Chakma does not guarantee that someone reads this script.

A 2009 encoding proposal records India–Bangladesh differences in glyph design, including rounder forms resembling the Myanmar script. The same letter can look different across fonts; a square usually signals missing Chakma font coverage.